So I’ve read this whole thread anyway and I have to say although some posts contained useful information, I still had to repeatedly cringe at the naivety and ignorance of other posts. I don’t want to sound pretentious or anything but even putting it into consideration that it might be possible to found a company that could compete against large ass government founded Chinese corporations that hold a monopoly of a whole industry while having little or no experience in any related field is pretty damn stupid.

I think the posts made by a dlethe, Dr.No and Igor_Lutsyk analysis in that regard were pretty spot on.

dlethe’s posts:

dlethe:

Well everybody just hold on. I just saw this thread and you all need a reality adjustment. Basically never in a million years it this project the way you want to take it ever going to come to market, be profitable, or even be fundable. You might just skip down to my suggestion on what WILL work if you can’t stomach some harsh criticism.

I’ve got the credentials, worked on everything from bit slice processors in the 80s, to Z80s, ASICs, FPGAs, up to and including NVMe and SSD firmware, even tweaked some compilers.

Plus, of course, I’ve got A3s, S9s, L3+, and even a few D3s. An open-source ASIC is absolutely impossible, and if you are even wondering why it is impossible, then you aren’t qualified to even make an assessment.

I’ll name just one absolute deal killer that nobody has even brought up – the necessary army of patent lawyers to deal with inevitable intellectual property concerns and royalty/licensing agreements that are going to have to be made with somebody)

-------------- WHAT IS VIABLE ---------

First, the key is not coming up with a magic ASIC. The way to make money is to come up with a coin using a new combination of OFF-THE-SHELF hardware and software that generates the work needed while minimizing clock cycles and maximizing parallelism.

We also need to come up with a coin that has a market, with low difficulty, that nobody else is attempting to optimize.

Now here is the logistic problem. Say coin XYZ has no hardware miners and the existing code is crap and can easily be optimized with some creative combination of hardware and software. This group identifies it, then WHAM. Bitcoin is off to the races, and their staff of 100+ engineers cranks it out while the rest of us are worrying about trying to fund building a prototype.

Why? BECAUSE THEY ARE READING THIS TOO, OR THEY WILL EVENTUALLY. IF not them, some other firm with the resources will do it.

History proves that first to market makes the money.

When I got my A3s, I had FIRST batch shipment. I was making $500+ PER DAY per miner. A few days later $300 per day, now it is $5.00 per day.

So there is absolutely no way that this can even be discussed in open forum. Think people, if it was possible to come up with a next generation SHA256 or Cryptonight or whatever miner that could possibly be profitable to warrant a redesign of what is already out there … then Bitmain would be shipping the S10 today (which does not exist).

Where do we go from here?? Frankly, IMO, this is unworkable. Best that can be done is improve mining EFFICIENCY on existing hardware by getting more work done in less time. That means optimizing code, pure and simple.

If an ASIC is the only way, you’re just going to have to farm out the entire project to a company that specializes in it … which means $$$$ up front, and you better have a design in mind and the software written so a simulator can test the design out.

dlethe:

It isn’t practical. I’d be willing to bet Bitmain has some logic buried in the firmware that kills their ASICs at some time via some checkpointing firmware.

i.e, if the chip detects that it isn;'t running their code, the chip gets bricked. You’ll never find that failsafe, if it exists. I know if I was on the bitmain team, then I sure as heck would have done that. I’d want to protect my intellectual property, and insuring nobody is hacking my hardware is important.

Now, lets say the problem isn’t there, and you can reprogram all you want … It is a huge undertaking to figure out what code should be run and to make the necessary changes and benchmark it. You’d be better off starting from scratch almost.

Way too much work involved to just find out … and are you willing to donate a few miners that might get bricked to find out??

dlethe:

You are not just going to find ASIC developers from these companies that has an employment agreement that lets them work on something else. They sure as heck won’t give up their six-figure salaries and retirement to work on something else.

But even if you did, then what would you use for a development platform, and who is going to pay for the software Now Xilinx has some decent online free-use software tools, but like all the “free” packages, they are married to the chip vendor who makes the device.

(Actually Altera has some low-end free stuff, but it isn’t going to work for this type of project)

Dr.No’s post:

Dr.No:

Landed on this page when researching what exactly mining ASICs do. Other than @nathan, it appears no one else on this thread understands complexities and economics of semiconductors.

If you are trying to set out to build or manufacture your own ASIC, you have to consider the cost and if the ROI is justified. I do not know too much about mining. I know some cryptography, embedded programming, hardware designing and semiconductors. I have started a few companies in those space.

My honest input is that there is too much enthusiasm and less expertise on this thread wrt to designing and manufacturing your own ASIC.

Let’s tackle the easy parts first:

There is no need to reverse engineer board or PCB. If you have existing ASIC’s datasheet, It is easy to design a competing board. If you don’t have access to the ASIC datasheet and specification, reverse engineering will not help. You won’t be able to debug.

Choice of controller and programming it is not difficult.

Writing logic for the ASIC to perform desired function (SHA256 HASH) can be done by any competent RTL programmer or ASIC designing house. To have someone build that IP shouldn’t cost more than $250K.

You can certainly use GPUs or FPGA, but they won’t be as power efficient or high performance as ASICs.

Any small or large chip company could have built mining ASIC. The ROI doesn’t justify it. Minimum $2M to $5M upfront investment is required. Without the details, I can’t say whether ASIC has to be on the latest process node or if older nodes will suffice. Latest process node increases mask cost and wafer costs. The older process nodes are much cheaper but
not as power efficient. The latest nodes will be 4x or more, power efficient than older nodes depending on design. You can go to any small foundry for old process nodes.

Right time to design mining ASIC was 2011 or 2012 time frame. Samsung last week announced its foundry was planning to manufacture mining ASIC for unspecified customer.

The computational power to mine keeps growing up (as difficulty level increases). The cost for power and cooling to house a mining operation will keep going up. The total energy consumption of bitcoin mining already eats up 1/400th of total world electric consumption. This will probably make bitcoin unviable in future as more efficient crypto-currencies come to the market.

Igor_Lutsyk’s post:

Igor_Lutsyk:

Hello everyone,

I am interested in mining for a quite long, owning a batch of S9s and doing some researches just for fun. I have strong experience is software development. Working right now as an engineer for Motorola Solutions Inc. in Poland dev center. Probably, will relocate to California soon.

I had hands on experience in working with hardware, raspberry, arduino, soldering, designing circuits and connecting different components. But I do not have experience designing chips, despite that fact that I was graduated in computer science and we had a lot of theory for building and designing microprocessors at student times.

It is great to see an initiative for an open source ASIC. I have spend a bit of time reading this thread, and would like to share my personal thoughts about this topic.

I would like to clarify from very beginning that next opinions and thoughts are personal and thus very subjective, I do not want to cut your wings guys nor hurt anyone in any manner. I always thing that I am a positive and open person.

So here are my thoughts:

I like the idea of making ICO for open source ASIC, it sounds really cool to me. But this goal looks so complex, and without having a team of hands on ASIC designers it is impossible to achieve that in my opinion. We should find some hardware designers from Samsung, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Mediatek, Intel, NVidia, AMD or other similar companies to achieve that. And give those guys a reason to work with us, money is not always an option.

Cloning an ASIC chip looks even more problemprone to me. I recall some Soviet technology for cloning Intel’s first processors by cutting chip layer by layer, one nanometer at a time. It is insane to achieve something like that, but not impossible Another option for clone is to steal chip design and ask TSMC or GlobalFundries to produce it for us, I strongly advice to avoid even looking to this direction, as it is not legal, and potentially could bring you so many problems in future.

Also found many ideas of buying ASIC chips and build hashing boards by your own. I think that it is not an option as well. Designing board circuit and soldering chips should be realy easy, but, probably, you wan’t get cheap ASIC chips. Even if you find a way how to buy these chips, which is a bit gray way as well, I think that total price of the miner would be close to the original one. Think of that in this way: if this would be profitable we would see a lot of cheap miner clones at the market.

So it was my critics I hate to give critics, but I think that it was my duty Elon Mask has proved that one can build a rockets without having professional expertise in it, but he has huge financial potential behind him.

My advice is to start from something simple, then you have chances to success in it.

Every idea stays around some problem, actually problem generates an idea.

I liked very much the idea of making liquid cooled miner, because there are so many people having loud miners in their apartments, and there are crazy projects around that. But I have also some concerns about using that system for a very long time, as if liquid cooler is placed in not completely closed system, after contacting with an air for a long time it stays conductive, thus making risk for your expensive mining equipment. But I believe that it is possible to achieve that.

So here are my ideas where probably one can look, without having super expertise knowledge or team behind him:

Make miners silent, or comfortable to keep at home, there is so high demand for this. So you can sell a kit for miners and earn really great money on it. Remember when there is a gold rush, shovel accessories sellers takes the profit Actually I have some prototype at my home, that probably worth 60-70$ that decrease sound from 72db to 40db. It is some way of alternative cooling that does not take a lot of place. I have pass the way of bypassing S9 fan protection, I saw that this topic was mentioned in this thread some time ago, I do not know whether it is still relevant, but I can share details if needed. Thinking about putting that to production, and would happily accept any help, cofounders, partners, whoever would like to participate. Idea is to create different kits for miners, making them silent, safe, monitorable and so on.

Also some time ago I’ve saw an idea of putting a heat generated by a miner back to use. Like heating a woter or home. With liquid cooling it should be simple to achieve. I am thinking, what about making a small electricity station for example from 10 miners, and put that electricity back to miners it would be a real best seller for mining farms. Even accepting that fact that heat to electricity efficiency is around 50-60%.

Also having not commercial charity idea that is related to crypto, but I am not sure that it will be interesting here, planing to start an open source project soon, if anyone is interested would be happy to discuss.

That’s it guys, sorry for such a long post, as I said please do not keep my critics personally, it is just my subjective critics, maybe it would be useful for someone, in other situations treat it as useless

Thumbs up for your initiative, if I can help you with something, I am here for your disposition.

For the chip we found the company that made the ASIC chip for Bitmain, that company is a IP Vendor, sine they already have the chip in production you can get it for a very very very affordable price including a royalty fee for the IP vendor.

or

merismus:

@FloridaWater, i found the company that actually does the Asic SHA256 coding for Bitmain!!! Yes that’s right Bitmain outsources the coding to a company in europe who has the Intellectual property right on the chip,we will have to pay a royalty fee to use the SHA-256 chip on our miner, this will give us time to work on our own chip.

The other tactic used by Bitmain is to bribe a TSCM employee to provide them with all Asic chip blueprints used by other companies, well i dont have this kind of money to bribe anyone yet ,

THIS is that kind of inside knowledge i’d sell my kidneys for. Seriously.

Also @nathan said he got an ASIC chip design ready for production. I (and I’m sure others too) would like to hear how that turned out.

This thread is pretty dead at this point but maybe someone could post some of the things that were posted in the slack group and the discord server?

This is the only place on the whole fucking internet that I could find where the construction of an “DIY ASIC miner” was seriously discussed and still this site is ranked pretty high in the google searches so it might be a good idea to make a “summary post” for someone who stumbles upon this thread but doesn’t want to read all 463 posts. I would really appreciate it if others, who posted their ideas here earlier this year, would give a quick rundown on how their company or project is going.

Finally:

CvR:

who is “we”?
“we” is going to overtake Bitmain?

I think OP was just joking. lol(He might as well just went full delusional idk)

Loving the can do attitude. Let’s face it, there are plenty of people out there with the technical knowledge for this project, and plenty more with the $15-20 million you are requesting. The subtle difference between the dreamers and the doers, is that out of all of the people with or without the knowledge, capabilities, and resources, some people actually choose to JUST DO IT.

I mean, what happened to Nike’s value since the recent controversial ad campaign? This thread is controversial by nature. Like the Nike ad campaign, take it however you want it. Whether that be with ego, modesty, compassion, emotion, rational, trolling, or intention. Look for the data. Look for the truth. You can do whatever set your mind to. You can be whoever you want to be.